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I sit and reminisce about the efforts of our founding fathers, their Fight and commitment towards the state’s freedom from slavery, I can’t help but wonder if my state is really free from the slavery within; the slavery every average citizen is subjected to as a result of poor leadership. I bet our past leaders that fought for the creation of this noble state will be turning in their graves with what is obtainable in Kogi of today; this isn’t what they fought for.
As a human rights activist, I am concerned over the inability of Kogi State Government to offset the backlog of unpaid salaries and arrears owed teachers and local government workers these categories in the state despite the fact that the state government had recently received its own share of the first and second tranche of Paris Club Refunds money.
I appeal to the Kogi State Government to adopt a strategic engagement and acceptable payment plans to resolve the intermittent crisis over salaries and arrears of council workers and primary school teachers across the state.
I appeal to the governor to do everything within his powers to ameliorate the untold hardship the workers are passing through over their unpaid emoluments.
The agitations by the workers across the state was gaining more sympathy over government’s claims because many expected that the earlier bailout funds and Paris Club Refunds money should have helped the state governments in a long way to offset the backlog of salaries owned workers.
Many teachers and lecturers in our schools & institutions of higher learning show little or no commitment to ethics of work. Many simply use their work to exploit students, while some show no accountability and leave their paid work to engage in private work.
Many universities are under lock for many months and lecturers are happy doing their private work. This is also what is seen in many government hospitals, where doctors show poor commitment to their work within the government facility where the same parents are referred to their own private clinics or hospitals where they could charge them large sums of money. Whether it is within the police forces, armed forces, public and private sectors, the story is the same. As a result of hardship, vices such as violence, murder, kidnapping, robbery and scam are on the increase on a daily basis.
The failure to do the needful has apparently evoked the series of protest in the state by the workers and therefore urged the state government to urgently marshaled out plans to address the matter which makes government appears as being insensitive to plight of workers.
I urge the Governor in all honesty to look deep into the plight of primary school teachers and council workers in the state. We have been inundated with cries of these set of workers, therefore we are passionately appealing to the governor do something to resolve these crisis .
State government workers were still owed salaries and those that got theirs were always coming to queue and sometimes even faint, at the defunct Access Bank in Anyigba, Kogi state, in very strenuous verification lines.
I am calling the governor, to show solidarity and cultivate respect for the dignity of the human person so that we can build a sustainable society where extreme poverty has no place and there is shared prosperity for all. We are convinced that Kogi state has more than enough resources to give work to all her citizens who are willing to work if wastage of national resources is curtailed through effective, accountable and responsible management and individuals and groups invest in financing for development.
– Alfa Tijani, a human rights activist, writes from Kogi state.
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